Not at all.
Suppose in a deterministic universe I miss my bus, and therefore I am late for work.
I would be easy to imagine that, in the same universe, I did not miss my bus, and therefore I was not late for work.
(This assumes that what you wrote accurately conveyed what you meant to communicate and not, as is often the case, that you meant something else entirely that you were unable to communicate.)
The 2nd paragraph i quoted from your post (above) is simply not true.
If a being or a machine can accurately see tomorrow’s choice today (providing there 2 or more choices available), then the question becomes diagnostic for the absence of libertarian freewill.
But: if theists did conceive of libertarian freewill, there is no reason to think free will is an “All or Nothing” business; it is reasonable to think some agent’s ability to choose unpredictably can be higher Or lower than average.
What would that look like?:
1] a being or machine believesan agent will choose vanilla tomorrow - - chocolate is not available tomorrow.
2] Holding all relevant factors the same, every time vanilla is predicted the prediction fails 27% of the time.
3] When new conditions that are available are identical except that chocolate is an additional flavor, then chocolate is always predicted with a fail rate of just 5%!
Both results indicate the test subjects in question appear to demonstrate at least SOME measure of freedom. And further, that when chocolate is NOTavailable, the test subject demonstrates an even stronger ability to exercise libertarian freewill.
For variable freedom to be available, by definition, the being or machine cannot have perfectly omniscient foreknowledge.
In Greek or Roman mythology, even gods can be wrong about the future… and thus libertarian freewill, to a limited extent, would be available - - and the god or gods with imperfect foreknowledge may simply be using a wizard-like capacity to calculate probabilities, rather than a savant’s virtual ability to state the answer that pops into his head when forecasting choices.
I’ve already explained why I disagree.
This hypothetical where both things are possible requires that missing the bus is an event that is less than fully determined by the rules that govern the universe and a fully determined state of that universe at some other reference time[1]. In other words, it requires a universe that is either at least in part non-deterministic, or one that is deterministic but has an indeterminate state at all times.
It could be that being late for work is a necessary consequence of missing the bus in this universe, or that not missing the bus leads to not being late. Still, because at least one event (missing the bus) can conceivably both happen and not-happen, then it must either be the case that some “initial conditions” are less than completely defined, or that the rules that govern the universe are less than completely deterministic.
The latter case is explicitly excluded when we stipulate a deterministic universe. Insisting on a deterministic universe without well-defined initial conditions leaves us with a non-fatalistic deterministic universe.
Otherwise, only one of the two would be possible. Which one, we don’t know, because we do not have exhaustive knowledge of that reference state – Laplace’s Daemon would know, though – but still only one. ↩︎
If a being is “outside of time” then they have no “today”.
If the being that’s “outside of time” is examining future choices from the perspective of “today”, that has no more effect on free will than if we examine the choices of historical figures from an earlier perspective.
The rest of your post is undermined by this flaw at the beginning.
But we do. This is a flaw of language, not of concept. We can question today whether the statement “The outside-of-time being sees that [insert circumstance here] obtains at [insert time here]” is true at the ‘today’ we have or it is not. The being does not need to have a today in order for us to be able to talk of it in these terms. The statement’s truth value either is something that changes with time as we progress through it and make what we think are choices, or it does not. If it does not, then what we think are choices cannot actually affect it. If it does, then we cannot definitively say that the statement is true today.
I disagree. It is metaphysically possible that, in a deterministic universe, I could have made my bus on time. And then, in that universe, it is also possible that I would have been on time for work.
In a universe in which I was fated not to be on time for work, it wouldn’t matter whether I missed my bus. If I had not missed it, then I would have to have been late for some other reason.
In causal determinism, every state of affairs is dependent on a previous state of affairs. In fatalism, the fated state of affairs is not dependent on a previous state of affairs. It will happen regardless. That’s how I understand it, anyway.
Whether you could have made your bus, just like everything else in a deterministic universe, depends on a previous state of affairs. If you do, it is because some previous state of affairs, that made you make your bus, obtained. It is not metaphysically possible, that in a universe that is deterministic, and where what ever makes you make your bus happens, that you do not make that bus.
Oh, sure, there could be a different deterministic universe, where the initial conditions are different, and where what ever makes you make your bus does not happen. But in the deterministic universe with a definite previous state of affairs, whether you miss your bus or not is just as determined as whether you make it to work on time.
A deterministic universe does not branch with possibilities. It evolves deterministically.
The term FATE is a pre-scientific term. If the ancients had understood the natural world as we do now, they no doubt would have toyed with full-throated determinism.
We moderns can see FATE as DETERMINISM-LITE.
I dont think there is much profit in trying to preserve the meaning of FATE in the modern world to the same degree the term was honored in the ancient world.
Being “outside of time” is like a playwrite holding onto a video cassette of his latest drama.
Within the cassette, the concept of today has no meaning. But within the drama, different days have significance.
From Wikipedia:
Determinism was developed by the Greek philosophers during the 7th and 6th centuries BCE by the Pre-socratic philosophers Heraclitus and Leucippus, later Aristotle, and mainly by the Stoics.
The difference between fatalism and determinism is about whether or not there are patterns (rules, I called them before; governing equations, if you will, something) one can follow to derive statements about the state of the world at one time from a knowledge of its state at another. Under fatalism, there generally are not. At least there is no promise that any perceived pattern, no matter how universal in location and over how long but finite timescales it is confirmed, is guaranteed to provide one with the ability to always make correct predictions this way. Under determinism, there are.
Under fatalism (as opposed to this greek tragedy notion of fate or destiny) all events are essentially inscribed into the proverbial fabric of reality, not just individual points many otherwise different paths can pass through. Whether this total determined-ness of history would be a consequence of some definitive initial condition and deterministic rules or not, there wouldn’t be alternatives available from within that universe either way. It would in that sense look exactly the same as a universe where all things are fated in just such a way as to appear like the universe is obeying some deterministic laws. This is what I meant when I said that there is in principle an overlap.
You are - No surprise! - wrong about how the term is used in present day scholarship:
Though the word “fatalism” is commonly used to refer to an attitude of resignation in the face of some future event or events which are thought to be inevitable, philosophers usually use the word to refer to the view that we are powerless to do anything other than what we actually do. This view may be argued for in various ways: by appeal to logical laws and metaphysical necessities; by appeal to the existence and nature of God; by appeal to causal determinism. When argued for in the first way, it is commonly called “Logical fatalism” (or, in some cases, “Metaphysical fatalism”); when argued for in the second way, it is commonly called “Theological fatalism”. When argued for in the third way it is not now commonly referred to as “fatalism” at all, and such arguments will not be discussed here.
Sure, but that is not what I was discussing. Rather, I was responding to @gbrooks9 assertion that it is “difficult to imagine” a deterministic universe that is not also a fatalistic one. It is, on the contrary, very easy to imagine. If, in a deterministic universe, I am late for work because I missed my bus, one could easily imagine a universe in which I am on time for work because I caught my bus. It is, therefore, not fated (in the universe in which I was late for work) that I be late. If it was fated, I would have been late regardless of whether I missed my bus.
Whether a universe in which I am not late can actually be instantiated, and not just imagined, is a different question.
Yes, I understand. I think this is the central disconnect between you and I and gbrooks9. When gbrooks9 or I speak of a deterministic universe (with set initial conditions), we mean a single deterministically evolving universe with a single specified initial condition. Indeed, considering one such universe one could also conceive of there being any number of alternative such universes, with things playing out differently in each. But the sequence (or more like interwoven mesh) of events inside any single one of them is entirely fixed and cannot morph into one that is at all different to any extent.
And I would suspect that (incompatibilist) advocates of libertarian free will would generally care more for an interpretation like that. After all, the mere existence of conceivable ways things could be all kinds of different is a necessary, but not sufficient condition of libertarian free will. Without the ability to actually non-deterministically choose between alternatives, the mere existence of such alternatives is, at least as it pertains to the free will question, arguably uninteresting.
Yes, that is how I understand it, as well. But, at the risk of repeating myself, the same cannot be said if a specific event is fated to happen. In that situation, the specific event must happen in every possible universe.
That may be fair, I suppose. It would be a different kind of fatedness, for sure, a stronger kind than “mere” deterministic inevitability of one single universe’s trajectory. In terms of free will, what’s important is whether alternatives are up for the choosing of agents.
With your conception of fate, fated events generally wouldn’t preclude all alternative possibilities, but rather enforce that all available paths intersect at least in individual such fated events. Under determinism, the alternative paths, if there exist any at all, are inscribed into altogether different universes, inaccessible by acts of volition.
Of course, a universe wherein all events are fated, moment to moment, is – at least with regards to the question of libertarian free will – no different from the deterministic one (with definite initial conditions). Predictability is the only difference at that point, but libertarian free will should exist in neither.
Not necessarily. In a world that is causally deterministic (which, it seems to me, is presently the most common sense in which the term “determinism” is used), each event would arise as an effect of an immediately preceding state of affairs. Whereas if each individual event was just fated to happen, there would not necessarily be any apparent or real cause/effect relationship between them.
Yes. I mentioned that difference just after the passage you quoted. In said very next sentence, and, indeed, even in the passage you quoted, I also stressed that the totally-fated and causally deterministic universe are equivalent with regards to the free will question specifically, and not in general.
Right. My apologies.
Since there is a possible universe which is completely empty and where nothing happens, there can be no such fated specific events.
Better, perhaps, to say that fated events occur in every possible universe where they can happen. But that then means there are possible universes where they can happen but don’t, so once again there can be no fated events.